Writing-An Interesting Case Study of 8-9 -year-old boys

What goes on inside my head when I’m
writing? A case study of 8–9-year-old boys
Kate Ruttle
Abstract
This article explores the idea that in order to improve
the way we teach children to write, we need to improve
our understanding of children as writers. Although
developing their metacognitive skills can give us a
clearer window into children’s understanding, we
must be wary of assuming that they ascribe the same
meaning to their metacognitive metalanguage as we,
their teachers, do. But we also need to beware of
making assessments based just on the children’s
writing – children can use writing to hide from us
what they do not know and cannot do. Through the
presentation of three brief case studies of lowerattaining
Year 4 (8–9-year-old boys) the article considers
the implications of assessing writing without
acknowledging the role of the writer.
Key words: metacognition, writing, boys,
negotiating meaning
Introduction and methodology
This article reports findings from the third year of an
action research project partially funded through Best
Practice Research Scholarships. The initial focus of my
research was to explore practical ways of developing
metacognition in my Key Stage 2 classroom and to
evaluatewhether promoting a metacognitive approach
to teaching writing would have a positive impact on
children’s attainment. Since I started this research,
overall attainment in writing has significantly improved
in my class, but the writing of the lowerachieving
children has not improved to nearly the
same extent.
So my action research focus in the past year (2002–2003)
has been to explore reasons for this discrepancy and to
try to reduce it. During the year I have been working
with a mixed ability class of Year 4 children (aged 8–9),
some of whom live in private housing and others in
local authority housing. All the children in the class
completed all the writing and drawing tasks described,
because these form part of the teaching and formative
assessment procedures I use in the classroom. None of
the activities described here was set up solely for the
purpose of collecting research data, but each was
introduced as part of my own ongoing endeavour to
develop a more socio-cognitive approach to teaching.
As I considered the data from one classroom activity,
questions would inevitably occur to me which I then
explored through a different activity.
For the purposes of this research paper, I have had a
particular focus on three lower achieving boys: Jack,
Reece and Lee. Their writing, my observations of them
and tape-recordings of conversations with them constitute
the data presented here.
My focus here is only on their ‘curriculum writing’,
that is on writing done as part of a curriculum-based
task which has, broadly speaking, been defined by the
teacher and which has the teacher as – at least part of –
the intended audience. This is as opposed to the
organisational lists, illicit notes, social invitations etc.
that often characterise children’s ‘personal writing’ in
the classroom. This is not to denigrate the importance
of personal writing, but is a pragmatic recognition that
I have more legitimate and comprehensive access to
their curriculum writing and that it is writing over
which I have, at least nominally, greater control and
understanding as to the intended audience and
purpose.
Establishing a theoretical framework
Writing does not happen in a vacuum – especially in a
classroom. By the time they reach my Year 4 classroom,
children have had four years of formal schooling (each
of which has included the daily literacy hour) and
eight or nine years of growing up in variously literate
households. Their understanding and expectations of
writing and the writing process are unique and
individual. For this reason, I intend to consider their
writing through a socio-cognitive lens in order to
embrace a more holistic view of literacy, which
recognises the importance of children’s individual
expectations and strategic knowledge about writing
within the classroom writing community as well as
acknowledging the extent of their procedural knowledge
about how to do writing. The way in which we, as
teachers, view the writing process inevitably shapes
the way we teach and assess writing.
Flower (1994) suggests that a socio-cognitive approach
to literacy regards ‘literate acts’ as contributions to
discourses in which participants need to know enough
of the conventions and expectations to enter the
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discourse and in which each participant has ‘‘a
repertoire of problem solving strategies for comprehending
and composing that can deal with the task’’
(Flower, 1994, p. 22). This dialogic view of literacy is
further developed by Wells (1999) who argues that
writing should be treated as a ‘thinking device’ rather
than a ‘‘univocal transmitter of the writer’s message’’
(Wells, 1999, p. 128). The socio-cognitive approach to
writing thus recognises that a teacher’s role in
developing skilled and thoughtful young writers
extends beyond helping children to develop procedural
knowledge – how to make their writing easier to
read – and content knowledge – how to make their
writing more interesting to read – but includes
negotiating and constructing a shared understanding
about what writing is for and why and how we engage
in it.
One of the goals of this research has been to explore
how children’s metacognitive knowledge can be
developed in the classroom context and the impact
this development has on their writing. Chang-Wells
and Wells (1995) describe metacognition as ‘‘knowledge
about one’s own mental processes and the control
of those processes to achieve one’s intended goal’’
(Chang-Wells andWells, 1995, p. 58). In her consideration
of the place of metacognitive awareness in making
meaning, Flower concludes that personal meanings
constructed through a reflective approach to learning
‘‘transform abstract ideas into personal working
knowledge’’ (Flower, 1994, p. 262). One of the issues
arising from such a consideration, however, is the fact
that the children’s developing metacognition is expressed
through a metalanguage, which is itself
developed through shared constructions of meaning
developed through classroom discussions and reflections.
But we also need to recognise that knowledge
cannot be construed as an objective entity because ‘‘for
each knower the propositions are embedded in a
unique structure of personal knowing arrived at
through a particular, socially situated learning biography’’
(Rommetviet, quoted by Wells 1995).
Recognising the ‘language gap’ in a metacognitive
framework
Hull (1985) acknowledges that in many classrooms
there is a significant gap between the prior assumptions
that children bring to a lesson and the prior
assumptions that teachers bring to it. Although his
research was undertaken in didactic teaching contexts
in secondary schools, the language gap is no less
significant when we explore younger children’s metacognitive
development because teachers still have to be
wary of assuming that we know what it is that children
are communicating when they try to express what it is
that they know and understand. Children’s developing
metacognitive understanding needs to be expressed
through metalanguage, but we cannot be
sure that we all ascribe the same meaning to the
metalanguage! One of my epiphanies this year, when
the language gap was made explicit, was with Jack.
Jack is eight. He enjoys writing; his writing is quite well
presented and he prefers to write ‘action led’ rather
than ‘character led’ or ‘motive led’ fiction. There is little
difference between Jack’s plan of a story and the final
fully developed story. For one particular piece of work,
Jack wrote quickly and keenly. He enjoyed his story
and was delighted to cover a whole page with writing.
When he had finished, I worked with Jack for an
afternoon, with me rewriting his original text and
asking questions, him supplying further information
and writing it down. At the end of the session Jack was
very pleased with himself – possibly because his
writing was even longer? Or because I was pleased
with him? Because he was conscious of having
achieved something ‘better’? Because the story was
definitely finished now?
With Jack’s permission, I used the combined text as
basis for a shared writing sessionwhere all the children
in the class were invited to comment on both versions.
At the end of the session, I privately asked Jack how we
could improve it even further. He gave me, as a knee
jerk reaction, the oft-repeated mantra ‘‘add detail and
description’’. So I asked ‘‘what do you think we’ve
done?’’ Jack read back some of the words he had
written during the redrafting process, but had no overt
recognition that what we had spent an afternoon doing
was adding detail and description.
A number of possible hypotheses could account for
this. One is that Jack has not assimilated a concept of
what it might mean to ‘add detail and description’ but
has simply learned the words; a second is that since I
had not explicitly told him during the afternoon that
what we were doing was adding detail and description,
he did not have the confidence to assume that that
was what we were doing; a third is that he was tired
and wanted to go out to play; a fourth is that his
understanding of ‘adding detail and description’ did
not tally with mine, and he did not think that that was
what had been achieved.
One question that I have with the whole metacognitive
framework is that since it appears to pay no attention
Figure 1: Part of Jack’s redrafted text
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to the wider sociocultural context of writing, and does
not take into account each child’s personal schemata
about writing, it does not account for the fact that some
children appear to receive and process the messages
differently from how teachers intend. Metacognitive
theorising does not always seem to help very much
with explaining why these children can repeat metacognitive
mantras but do not apply, cannot recognise
the effects of, and cannot evaluate their own performance
in the light of these ‘taught’ elements of metacognition.
This may be due to the quality of evidence
we require to determine that a child has acquired
‘metacognitive understanding’; Jack has clearly acquired
some of the mantras which, in my classroom,
constitute the shared beliefs about good writing, but
does not yet appear to ascribe to them the same
meaning that I do in my personal constructs.
We need, therefore, to be wary of equating children’s
appropriate use of metalanguage with our assumptions
about the extent of their metacognition. By the
same token, we need to be wary of equating the writing
that children achieve with their understanding and
expectations of the writing experience.
Negotiating meaning with an orally articulate
child
Alexander describes classrooms as places ‘‘where,
depending on the mode of pedagogy adopted, meanings
are transmitted, negotiated and/or created’’
(Alexander, 2000, p. 563). My own classroom research
has taught me that, in spite of the caveat mentioned
above, if meanings and values about writing are
negotiated and if that process is developed to create a
shared perception of what ‘good writing’ is, then
children write with a greater sense of purpose. I use
‘write’ in quite a loose way here insofar as I am
including the oral narration of a text with the specific
intention that it should be transcribed as a form of
writing, in addition to the conventional meaning.
Reece is nearly nine. Since he started school he has
been on the Special Educational Needs (SEN) register
with global mild learning difficulties. In writing, these
manifest themselves as uncertain letter formation used
partly to disguise insecure spelling and incomplete
sentences. He writes very reluctantly; ‘‘I don’t know
what to write’’ is his constant complaint.
When you talk to Reece, he talks fluently, easily and
charmingly and always about what he has seen. He
spends a lot of time watching films with his mum and
he clearly watches with a very active interest; he will
discuss not just actions but motivation, characterisation
and setting. Reece also draws very well.
If you begin to characterise Reece as a visual learner
you can easily recognise why his own writing is so
unsatisfactory for him, reinforcing as it does a very
dismal visual picture.
But put Reece in front of a microphone . . . and he is in
his element as a storyteller. He creates and spins yarns
drawing on influences from film, TVand stories he has
heard; he does accents; he modulates his voice to
control the pace and atmosphere; he varies sentence
structure and makes conscious use of repetition and
patterning; he makes careful vocabulary choices; he
shapes his stories well; he consciously adopts an
authorial voice and stance. When other children
interrupt his taping he comes out of character and
chats to them, then says into the microphone ‘‘sorry
about that, Mrs Ruttle. Now back to the story . . . ’’ and
Figure 2: An extract of Reece’s writing continues.
Figure 3: Reece’s drawing: A bully is like a van. It rushes
you and bully’s you
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Reece and I have now come to an agreement. He writes
the first paragraph – or few sentences – of a story on
paper in order to satisfy my traditional inner voice
which feels the need to insist that he makes some
attempt at conventional writing. I then give him the
microphone and tape recorder and he takes himself off
into the corridor, haltingly and expressionlessly reads
his first paragraph aloud, sighs deeply, relaxes and gets
on with his story. I transcribe his story on a computer
and give him a transcription and disk. I ‘mark’ the
transcription in the same way as I mark all the
children’s written work, with suggestions for places
they may wish to redraft for clarity or effect. He then
edits the transcription and we end up with a text that
he is proud of. One of the filmic features of Reece’s
writing is that he changes time, scene and person
unthinkingly and without markers. His most frequent
editorial task is to insert adverbials of time and place in
order to give his writing more cohesion.
Wells (1999) argues that all meaning making involves
intertextuality; not simply between texts in the same
mode but also between texts in different modes, for
example speech and writing (Wells, 1999, p. 130). The
DfES acknowledges this – to a degree – in Developing
Early Writing (DfES, 2001) through the insertion into
the writing process of ‘talk for writing’, which is
intended to take away from the writer the cognitive
burden of thinking about what to say, in order that
when she is writing she can concentrate more on the
secretarial aspects. What Reece and I achieve is,
arguably, simply a step beyond this.
Negotiating meaning with an orally inarticulate
child
Lee is the same age as Reece and his SEN profile is very
similar in many ways. When he writes, he has similar
issues to Reece with regard to spelling, handwriting,
missing words in sentences and enthusiasm to write.
The main difference between Reece and Lee as writers
is that whereas Reece is orally confident, Lee is
generally shyer and less articulate in the classroom.
In spite of this, I thought it would be worth giving Lee
the chance to make a tape recording of a story.
However, suspecting that Lee was likely to be too shy
to talk much into the tape recorder, and perhaps would
be too shy with me, I decided to let Reece help Lee to
tell his story.
The transcription shows that both boys have some
understanding about the basic construction of a story,
Figure 4: Extract of Reece’s unedited written work
Figure 5: The transcribed version of the beginning of the
same story
Figure 6: Lee’s writing
Figure 7: Transcript of part of the tape made by Lee and
Reece
74 What goes on inside my head when I’m writing?
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but whereas for Lee the simple plan – the monsters are
asleep; the hunter wakes them up; they chase the
hunter and kill him – is the story, Reece recognises that
this is not enough.
Helping Lee to progress in writing is quite a different
process from helping Reece. Lee needs more than just a
scribe.Writing with Lee is a matter of planning what is
going to happen through talk, then helping him to
construct his text orally, building it slowly, sentence by
sentence. The scribe needs to write the sentence too in
order that one person is aware of the developing text,
because Lee’s hand/brain/eye coordination is insecure
and what he writes is not usually consistent with
what he thinks he has written, so he cannot read back
his own writing as a visual check to remind himself of
where his sentence is heading. Interestingly, but
perhaps unsurprisingly, when Lee returns to a text
that was begun in a previous writing session, he will
always continue to write under the scribed text rather
than under his own.
For Lee, the writing experience must be a baffling one.
A possible insight into his interpretation of why we
write came in the following interchange. All the
members of the class had been undertaking independent/
paired research into some aspect of the town in
which the school is situated. The children all chose
their focus topic, and had access to a variety of books,
guidebooks, photographs and tourist information
brochures, as well as easy access to the Internet for
their research. We were doing a shared update, with
each child reporting on what they were finding out
about and how far they had got when the following
exchange (transcribed immediately afterwards) occurred:
Lee: I’ve been finding out about the Horseracing
museum.
KR: Well done. What have you found out?
Lee: I don’t know. But I’ve written it down.
KR: What have you written?
Lee: Look. (Turns book round to show recorded
information)
What does Lee’s own internal construct of the writing
process consist of?Writing is something you do and the
teacher looks at? I think we can probably assume that
making marks on paper plays a significant role. But
what else is involved?
In an informal taped interview with two other boys in
June, Lee asserted that he likes writing. When asked
what he likes writing about he cast around the
classroom for inspiration and came up with ‘‘Clothes!’’
Whatever else Lee has or has not learned in his time at
school, he knows how to be a good pupil! He offers
answers that he thinks will please his teacher and he
knows the kind of thing that teachers expect people to
write about.
As part of awhole class activity before Easter Lee drew
a picture of ‘‘what goes on inside my head when I’m
writing’’.
In the unconnected circles inside his head he mentions:
setting, vocabulary, good words, ideas, good start,
capitals, guessing, spelling. He has clearly been
listening to some of what the literacy hour prescribes
for Year 4, Term 2, which includes setting, the
importance of good and accurate word choice and a
strong beginning. I wonder how he interprets each of
those words? How contingent is the metacognition
being given by me, the teacher, to inexperienced
writers like Lee? Could my preconceived learning
objectives, however well intentioned and metacognitively
‘pure’ get in the way of actually working with
how some individual children think about their own
writing?
Figure 8: Lee’s writing under the scribed writing
Figure 9: Lee’s drawing of ‘What goes on inside my head
when I’m writing’
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Negotiating meaning about why we write
In my writing field diary in November, I wrote to
myself: ‘‘How can I teach the children what writing is
for? To communicate, rather than to burble on, filling
pages’’. Scribblings and overwriting around this patch
in my diary indicate that I recognised fairly quickly the
issue with the word ‘teach’. These children have been
taught to write for four years, and teachers’ assumptions
around what writing is about and for have
underpinned the teaching. But how much, I wondered,
had the children taken on about those assumptions? I
realised that teaching the underlying assumptions
might not be productive – but that finding out about
children’s understanding and knowledge of writing,
negotiating a shared understanding and creating our
own classroom beliefs may help to resolve the issue.
That diary marked the beginning of some focused
dialogic talk in the classroom as we began to explore
writing as a concept, to consider the distinction
between ‘having to write about something’ and
‘having something to write about’. My class and I
discussed writing (unfortunately, but unavoidably, at a
time when Lee was withdrawn for a literacy intervention
strategy!), acknowledging the importance of both
curriculum and personal writing; recognising the
importance of different kinds of writing; discussing
why we write and for whom; what is hard about
writing and what is easier; what is interesting about
writing and what is boring.
Through this process Iwas consciously trying to engage
the children in what Hull (1985, p. 180) calls ‘constitutive
involvement’, i.e. the extent to which children
participate in their own education through observing,
speculating, thinking and writing. I have to acknowledge
that children in Year 4 are still young enough to see
‘pleasing the teacher’ as a major motivator for developing
an interest in writing. But most of the children
have nowgot a clearer understanding about themselves
as writers and about why we write, and are beginning to
recognise that writing can be dialogic. Through
negotiation, we are managing to create a classroom
culture in which meaning – the content of the writing –
and procedural knowledge – knowing about writing –
are seen as being intertwined. Many of them can
recognise and talk about the interaction between the
two and are beginning to redraft original writing to
explore how changing the language can impact on the
meaning. The following extracts were redrafted spontaneously,
without intervention from me:
Figure 10: ‘before’ and ‘after’ texts in the redrafting process
76 What goes on inside my head when I’m writing?
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Assessing writing
According to the recently published QCA criteria
(DfES, 2003), Reece and Lee merit very similar scores
for writing. If I re-examine extracts from individual
pieces and consider sentence structure and punctuation,
text structure and organisation, composition and
effect, handwriting and spelling – they both attain
similarly low scores (2C for their Y4 writing SATs). But
is this a true reflection of what they can do? Can I use
this information to make constructive ‘notes for next
step with child’ (as suggested on the helpful ‘writing
task analysis sheet’ (QCA, 2003))?
All the socio-cognitive information I have about these
boys as writers suggests to me that their ‘next steps’ are
completely different, but the positivistic lens through
which I am obliged to assess their performance would
indicate that their needs are very similar. The simplistic
notion that you can take a single contrived sample of
behaviour from an individual and use that to gain
information about a wide range of knowledge, skill
and understanding belies the complexity of the classroom
and the learning process.
Dahlberg, Moss and Pence (1998) propose that assessment
should be by means of a portfolio of ‘pedagogical
documentation’, as in the Reggio Emilia schools. The
core belief of this group of schools lies in the belief that
‘‘reciprocity, exchange and dialogue lie at the heart of
successful education’’ (Edwards, Gardini and Foman,
1998, p. 10). There is always, of course, the issue of deciding
what evidence to keep in the portfolio, and those
decisions in themselves reflect the co-construction
that teachers and children make. But this approach
has advantages of transparency and can lead to
reflection and reconstruction and, most importantly,
can throw some light on children as writers. Level 2C
does not offer the same opportunities! The opposing
assessment approaches of the ‘one-off’ SATs on the one
hand and, on the other, the Reggio Emilia portfolio of
experiences built up over time, underline the way that
the competing images of, and beliefs about, literacy
shape all the decisions we make about what and how
we teach, assess and plan for development.
Conclusion
During the time that I have been reflecting about
children as learners and writers inmy own classroom, I
have come to believe that the process of dialogic talk
underpins all their learning – not just their learning as
writers. Wells (1999) writes that ‘‘acts of meaning do
not occur in isolation but as dialogic contributions to
discourse . . . That is to say, they occur in the course of
an exchange of meaning between participants in order
to perform some actions in a specific situation’’ (Wells,
1999, p. 235). My own belief is that promoting and
encouraging dialogic talk helps children to understand
and express their own ‘personal constructs’. Through
this, they begin to understand their learning, which in
turn helps teachers to understand the children as
writers and so to undertake purposeful assessment for
learning. Finding ways of accessing the children’s
understanding is particularly important when we
remember that each child has to construct not just
their own meaning of a text, but also the meaning they
ascribe to my instructions and its place within their
own working theories of writing.
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CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Kate Ruttle, Literacy Coordinator, Ditton Lodge
First School, St John’s Avenue, Newmarket,
Cambs CB8 8BL.
e-mail: kateruttle@lineone.net
Literacy July 2004
Source:UKLA 2004